


The Flames Left Only Ash & Ice

by ElspethRoe



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Political Marriage, Slow Burn, War, introspective
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-09-01 05:09:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16758553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElspethRoe/pseuds/ElspethRoe
Summary: Castle Black holds only grim, frozen defeat for him.He marches on Winterfell, to what he is almost certain will be his death.And then Sansa Stark finds her way to the wall, ragged, weary, and looking more like a sign from the thrice-damned gods than anything he's ever seen.





	1. To Victory Or Defeat

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings!
> 
> I'm pumped to be writing my first ASOIAF fic, and I hope you'll all enjoy. I must admit, it's been quite some time since I've read the books, so this fic will be based more off the show than anything else, but I hope it will have some book elements in it as well. Bottom line is: I love Stannis, and I love Stephen Dillane too. Season 5 was brutal, and I need a pick me up after rewatching it. So here we are. It's a little odd for me to be writing this, because really I ship Tyrion/Sansa more than anything, but this is what's working for me right now, and I don't care to argue when inspiration strikes. I'm honestly not sure how long this fic will go, or how regularly I'll update it, but for now I just hope you guys enjoy this little starter.
> 
> Be sure to let me know what you think--I value feedback!
> 
> Roe

Castle Black is no place for a child. 

It is no place for a woman, either. 

The wall is high and unforgiving, and the meager shelter of the castle does little in the way of shielding its occupants from the burning ice it is made of.

Its occupants, in turn, do little in the way of protecting their guests from what lies beyond the wall—or indeed, from themselves.

 _Half these watchmen are murderers and rapists._

His eyes are fixed closely on Shireen whenever she is near, and when she is not, something deep inside of him _itches,_ and will not be soothed until he sees her again. 

The men here, all dressed in black, are growing restless.

Damn Jon Snow for his bloody Stark honor. _Damn_ him for being the very image of his father, every inch a lord, lacking in nothing but title.

Damn the North to hell for being unconquerable, and—he fears—unsavable.

Selyse goes half mad with it; with the prospect of the long march to Winterfell, with Shireen’s impossible happiness here, where all those around her are only weary and longing for home. 

She shouts during the nights, loud enough for him to hear from his own chambers; loud enough for every soldier of the Night’s Watch to hear, and when he makes his way heavily down the halls toward her, he is met with her maids, their pale faces.

She shouts again, and yes, he knows that pitch.

That pitch is _madness,_ he has heard it from her throat too many times before, too many bloody thighs before, too many little grey patches on their daughter’s face before, and he wonders what calls it up from her depths now.

Turns from her rooms, because years of being wed to her has taught him that he will only make it worse.

_She will see him, and think only of sons._

_She will say it, will curse her womb, and he will tell her it was not her fault. Will admit it as a truth that has been hard coming for years and years: He was not born to sire sons._

_And she will call Shireen a curse, the bane of his house, of his name, and he will wish to strike her for it._

_She is his daughter._

Selyse shouts during the days standing right before his face—shouts her lungs raw and bleeding at him while he sits in the chair behind his desk. Shouts about Jon Snow— _that son of some tavern slut—_ and orders, commands, _begs_ him to take her from here, begs for Dragonstone again, that awful prison she has always despised so. 

He watches her, listens, and clenches his jaw.

_He feels the grind of his teeth all the way up in his temple._

The cold has brought her to this, he thinks. The cold, and the sparse food, though there is enough to keep a thin layer of fat above her bones. She remembers all too well that wretched year; remembers the men lying dead all around her, the horses, and the cats, and the dogs, and the rats.

She remembers it _all,_ and she cannot bear it again.

She need not.

But she does not believe him when he tells her so. 

There is talk of a sacrifice. There is talk of his army sent packing, talk of too many men, and food running short, and winter, winter, _winter._

_It is coming._

She hears it all, and she begs him to set loyal men alight. 

Begs him to set _her_ alight.

He wrestles with her then, wrestles a kitchen knife from her trembling hands, from the thick vein at her neck, shakes her in an attempt to jostle the madness that has taken root inside her afresh, and when she mutters something weak and incoherent about kingsblood, he wants to tell her that if she touches a hair on that precious girl’s head, he will flay her and only then will he burn the pieces.

But he is not Roose Bolton, and Selyse is his wife.

So he does not.

But gods help her, if she even thinks of daring it, he _will._

She does not dare, though he knows she thinks it, wishes it, _dreams_ of it. There is still a pyre in the center of the castle where Mance should have been burned, and he watches her eye it as though she expects her god’s voice itself to radiate from it. 

When he smells smoke in the night, at first, he thinks it a dream.

When it does not fade, when it thickens and people begin to shout, he rouses himself, and _oh gods, he can see well enough where the flickering light is coming from, red and deadly._

He knows a moment’s panic, a drop of his stomach that is utter horror, and he feels Shireen’s slight weight in his arms as clearly as on the day she was born.

_No._

He is running, stumbling, _gods, the smoke is thick,_ and—

And outside the castle walls, on the yet-lit but near quenched pyre, is Selyse, and she is burning in the middle of a wasteland that is frozen white.

He meets Shireen’s gaze through the smoke, and he cannot tell if the tears on her cheeks, nearly frozen, are for her mother or the sting of the smoke. 

The Red Woman watches silently from a window high in the castle wall, her mouth stunned, open in a round, perfect ‘o’.

And Selyse’s offering to her god neither gentles the snow, nor calls the Northern lords to his service.

_The thrice-damned Northerners will not fight._

He feels Jon’s gaze with every refusal, and he knows the Lord Commander is uneasy with it, almost ashamed.

_Jon Stark of Winterfell, but now he will remain a Snow of Castle Black for life._

There are three days when he does not know what to do. 

A day for Shireen, of her arms wrapped around him, trembling, his own, unpracticed embrace poor fare to comfort a child who has just lost her mother, whatever sort of mother she may have been.

A day for Commander Snow, for the wretched Northerners. For one last appeal.

_No help comes._

_It was once said the Stannis Baratheon did not beg, but now he feels as though he ought._

_He does not._

_If only._

And a day in which there is nothing. A day he watches his soldiers, watches them carry on with their lives. Watches them do their duties and _trust_ him. They trust their King.

But he cannot lead them. The year has turned to winter all too soon, and he has not half the men he needs by his side. No wildlings, no northerners. They all look to their blessed Starks to save them, though the only one left to them has refused the name and the birthright.

_He has nowhere to lead his men, and if they stay here, the winter will kill them all._

So they saddle. He calls Davos, calls Melisandre and curses her name all in the same breath; her fires, her shadows, his brother stabbed in the heart by a son that was _never_ a son and his wife burning on a pyre.

_What a wretched husband he is, as he marches to war not a moon after her passing. She will lie in an unmarked grave, and he will not miss her in his bed._

He calls Shireen, settles her on her horse himself, because her eyes are still red and he remembers the despair he felt watching her watch the smoke that smelled of Selyse.

He knows the shock of it; remembers the grief well enough. Remembers a ship going down with a violence that will still stun him if he allows himself to think on it too long, and he has no practice at all at comforting a child, but he never wanted her to endure the same as him.

_She is the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon. And she was never supposed to suffer._

He sets his jaw as he mounts his own horse; feels the air burn his lungs with its ice, and wonders what Winterfell holds for him. He does not fear Roose Bolton; sneers at the wretchedness of the coward who has holed himself up in a greater man’s keep.

But he does fear winter and a castle whose walls are strong. He fears men who are cold and hungry, grown weak in the winter wind. He hasn’t felt this weak since Storm’s End, since a siege just as hopeless as the one he will undertake now, only this time there is no Robert out in the land beyond the horizon, fighting his way to victory, and Davos sits astride the horse beside him, no onion to be found.

_He fears his own weakness now, more than he fears any man’s strength. He has fought, and he cannot help but feel he has failed._

_A man without friends is a man without power. A man with half a frozen, exhausted army, none others willing to fight for him--_

But they ride; whether to victory or to defeat, they can ride only forward, so he bids Jon Snow farewell, gives the boy ships, the only thing remaining to him in abundance, because something in the boy’s too-old eyes makes him believe in _others,_ in white-walkers more than he has ever believed in shadows, or flames, or kingsblood, though he has witnessed the effects of their wonders many times.

They ride, and he sees only Winterfell in his mind’s eye, and the battle that awaits him there.

_He will free Winterfell, will win it back for the true North, ungrateful whelps, or he will die trying._

He has never marched to a battle feeling so certain of his own defeat.

His horse takes one step, two.

And Sansa Stark rides through the gates of Castle Black, worn, weary, battered and bloody, but alive and Tully-red.

She is the closest thing he has ever seen to a miracle born of flames.

_~_

_When Stannis is only a boy, too small yet to lift a sparring sword above his bony shoulders, the sword master at Storm’s End tells his father he will never be half the swordsman his older brother is._

_He fights against tears of shame as he overhears, his round cheeks trembling with the effort of keeping them at bay. His hands ball themselves into fists, and he looks down at them, sees how small they are, as he envisions the enormity of Robert’s. His arms are small too, skinny, and his shoulders are narrow to his brother’s._

His father kills the runts in the litters his best hounds whelp. Snaps their necks, tosses them in a sack, and heaves them to the sea.

He calls it a kindness.

_He can still feel the bruises on his back, left there by Robert’s harsh hand during today’s training, cruel and unrepentant though his brother is no brute, and they are throbbing like his eyes as he refuses to cry._

_He grits his teeth and makes up his mind there and then, that very moment._

_He may never be as large and ruddy as Robert, will never be the eldest son, the heir, but he_ will not be the runt.

 _Tomorrow he will train harder, fight better. He will grow. He will_ make _himself grow. Never as large as Robert, no, he is no fool, but he will grow taller. Broader._

_He will be better._

_He swears it._

~

_When Stannis is nearly a man, too young to have tasted a woman’s delights for himself, though others might have weakened years before—Robert certainly had—a whore swears on her life that she would rather starve than fuck him._

_Not his whore—never his whore. He has thrown himself too much into his training, his sparring, his betterment to have sought out women for his own pleasures. No, this whore is tucked into a little-used hall deep in the torch-lit belly of Storm’s End, and she is wrapped in Robert’s arms._

‘How many men have you fucked?’

‘How many women have you?’

_Their laughter is soft and warm, and Stannis grits his teeth to hear it._

_What would their parents have said? Their mother?_

A ship on rocks, smashed to the sea. 

‘Anyone I know?’

_Robert’s voice is gruff and contented, and Stannis is determined to pay his brother no mind, wrapped up in his whore as he is. He needs a book from a shelf down here, and why should he leave just because Robert has chosen to bed a woman who will never be his wife this night?_

_Their giggles go on and on, and he pays them no heed until he hears—_

‘And Lord Renly, I expect he will grow to be the handsome one.’

_A sly tease from a whore that entices his brother to mock outrage._

‘Next to Stannis, he will!’

 _Laughter peels of the walls, and he envisions the girl’s head thrown back with it, hair falling down her naked form, though the skin beneath it is murky with an ill-supplied imagination._

‘If Lord Renly calls on us, we shall all be delighted—I imagine your particular…gifts…are a family trait. But I should think the girls will be all the more grateful if your Stannis keeps away. He’s too bony to fuck, and that awful scowl would scratch against my skin.’

 _He tastes blood in his mouth. He has ground his teeth too hard._

_There are more words, the refusal of him spoken in the soft artful voice of a woman that will haunt him for years to come—and when has a whore ever sworn off a highborn lord?—and he begrudges Robert his dalliances more than ever after that._

_He makes a vow of his own that night, when he has his desired tome tucked beneath his arm, though he has forgotten what he ever wanted it for._

_He will never be Robert; he will never drink, and dance, and sing, and make too much merry._

_And he will never bring a whore into his bed._

_His brother may content himself to sully his person in any manner he chooses, but Stannis—_

_Stannis will devote himself to far nobler pursuits._

_He’d like to think that, of the two of them, he knows which would make their parents proud._

~

 _When Stannis is just barely a man grown, he both sees his first battle, and takes for himself a wife._

_He has seen combat before, fought his fare allotment of skirmishes, but not like t_ his.

_Not an army with bannermen, an infantry, and cavalry, the clash of swords and men’s screams the only sounds to be heard for miles._

_He decides that day, with a blade stained red and arms aching with the strain, lungs burning with it, heart pounding as he ducks, and swerves, and swings his sword, that battles are not particularly noble._

_The songs told to boys in the youth are lies._

_There is no glory in cutting life after life down, until they are nothing but a pile of corpses._

_But it is_ just _._

 _Just_.

_And that is what he shall call it the rest of his life. He will not be Stannis the Noble, no, he will leave that for Renly, perhaps. He will content himself to be Stannis the Just, and if no songs are ever written for him, if no maidens swoon into his arms, he will know, at least, that justice has been seen to its rightful end by his own hand._

He _lifts the fallen banner that day, carries it with him as they charge again, and again, and_ _again._

_And when they have finished, there is death._

_All those around him are dead, and yet, he is not, because he stole life from them before they could steal it from him._

_It is just, and it is enough._

_And then—Selyse._

_He does not choose the match. It is chosen for him, and just like the battle, it is just._

_A highborn woman to give him highborn sons. Very well. He cloaks her._

_She is not very beautiful, but he does not worry himself over it. Whores are said to be beautiful, and they are whores. A highborn lady can give him trueborn heirs, and no beauty at all is required for that._

_She does not smile at him, nor he at her, because her face already has lines in it, though she is very young, and he wonders at it; wonders if there are lines in his own expression yet._

_Perhaps the battle has put some there._

_She picks at her food during the modest feast, while he consumes sensible bitefuls of his own, finding no defendable reason to waste such rich fare._

_They do not dance._

_And later, when they are herded to the bride chamber and the doors are flung wide, his eyes resolutely on the hall before him and not on the wife who seems jittery and uneven at his side—_

_The room is in disarray, a pitcher of wine that should have gone untouched this night already drunk, and the bed,_ the bed.

Robert and his filthy whores.

_He passes a large portion of his wedding night shouting, taking his older, larger, handsomer, more talented brother to task for the gross defilement of his marriage bed._

_The remainder of the night is spent in a remade bed with a wife he barely knows, stiff with something that looks like fear, but that isn’t—he never is able to give it a true name. Her breaths are reedy and high in her chest, skin shockingly cool beneath her nightdress for the warmth of the fire as he swallows and attempts to make a man of himself, only able to think of Robert, and what his brother must surely have done to his whore in the this very bed._

_He has heard the way they cry out his brother’s name._

_Selyse makes no sound at all as he covers her with his own body, all elbows, only screws her eyes as tightly shut as they will go before he ever touches her. When he finishes, he is a sticky, unpleasant mess, and he winces as he hastens to clean himself._

_But there is a small, token spot of blood on the sheets. Just a few drops._

_It is enough._

_And it is just._

~ 

_When Stannis is a young man, as ruddy and strong as he will ever be, finally grown tall and skillful with a sword, in the prime of his virility and youth, he keeps the halls where he was born for his brother’s rebellion, spilling the blood of uncountable men on Storm’s End’s shores, while he and Selyse watch as blood after blood slips from her womb, a stain on too many white sheets._

_Son after son, just drops of blood, like a marriage bed._

_They starve for the rebellion, he is passed over for Renly when it comes time to inherit Storm’s End, all his life’s blood poured out bitterly for it, his youth gone to it for nothing, and Selyse bleeds for an heir, and neither, it seems, it likely to come to any relief soon._

_The first time she manages to carry, only to birth a babe who will not cry, he hurls his sword down an empty hall so hard, hears it clamor against stones so roughly, he takes it to the smith for he fears he has blunted it._

A son, such a fine weight in his wife’s arms, quite undeniably dead.

 _And she_ keeps _the thing, the body that should have been a baby, but that most certainly is not._

_After that, an indifferent duty becomes an undeniable chore. He is still all elbows, and she tells him to hurry up._

_So he does. He readies himself with his hand before he joins her in her bed, finds her willing but unenthusiastic, disdainful, speaking of curses spoken by Robert on their bed, on their sons, and he spends himself in as short a time as he can manage._

_More sons follow, some drops of blood, and two more fully formed, shocks of Baratheon black hair slick on their heads, tiny fists curled against themselves._

_Not a cry in their lungs between them._

_He does not even wish to bed her anymore, dreads even the thought of trying, not only because she smells of some maester’s concoction that makes his stomach turn and her eyes have gone strangely milky, but because every time he beds her, he knows he will have one more boy’s blood on his hands come a few weeks or months._

_But he needs a son; there must be a son for Dragonstone, if not for Storm’s End, so they try and they try, and they try._

_And finally, Shireen._

_He lets out a sob without tears--the first he has heaved since he watched his mother sank to the bottom of the sea--when he hears the first infant’s cry. His pacing in the hall comes to a swift stop, and oh Seven, that is his child’s cry._

_The relief is overwhelming, so much so, he does not even think to ask after a son or daughter until they have placed the squirming thing in his arms and he is staring into eyes shaped just like his own._

_A—daughter._

_He has a moment’s pause, a breath that he misses as he understands that he holds in his arms a girl and not a boy, Selyse making her displeasure at the fact well known, but then the tiny thing screws up her face and lets out yet another wail, and any doubt or disappointment fades immediately at the sound._

_A living, breathing child._

_And for the first and the last time in his life, Stannis finds that the idea of a son matters very, very little indeed._

_~_

_Selyse is the first to spot it, and when she does, there is a terrible flash of triumph in her eyes._

_She has never been pleased with their tiny girl, has been angry every moment of little Shireen’s life for her father’s seeming inability to begrudge her life in place of her brothers, and so when she declares their child infected with greyscale, shrieks at him that it is spreading, that she will be dead in only weeks, he thinks that this, too, is just, in a cruel, cruel way._

_Gods, what has he done?_

_Maesters are called from everywhere, because his wife keeps three dead sons in her rooms, but he knows with sickening certainty that if Shireen dies, Selyse will burn their daughter’s corpse instead, and his only living child is_ dying _._

_Because of him._

He cannot rest for weeks, not while he hears his daughter screaming in pain at the treatments she is subjected to, and so must bury himself in work, and work, and work. 

_She is still small enough for him to hold in the palms of his hands._

_Too small to die._

_When one maester suggests she be sent to live among the stone men for the time remaining to her, he shouts and throws the man from the keep._

_She is Shireen Baratheon. She is his daughter. If she is to die, it will be here, on Baratheon soil._

_Selyse prays every day, and though he keeps the suspicion tucked into the very back of his mind, never to see the light of day, a part of him wonders whether she prays for their daughter’s life, or her death._

_But eventually, the disease is stopped. His child lives. The maesters leave._

_He holds her in his palms once more, and he stares at her._

_He cannot breathe._

His father always killed the runts of the litter, the pups born with twisted paws or blind, pink eyes.

He called it a kindness.

_He will touch the finely layered stone on his daughter's face only once in his life, while the infant sleeps, and no one will ever know._

_His beautiful Baratheon daughter, and look what he has done._

_~_

_The Lannister witch bears Robert three golden-haired children, named his heirs before anyone suspects anything about it._

_But oh, when they do._

_A rebellion newly ended begins afresh. Robert is dead, his eldest son on the throne, except—_

_It is not his eldest son on the throne. There are no trueborn sons to speak of, according to Ned Stark, and he is stunned when he realizes what it means._

He _is the trueborn heir._

_By the gods, if Robert only knew. His poor brother would be shouting himself hoarse, calling for a woman, any woman to wed and fuck. There are so many bastards, his brother would certainly be virile enough._

_But apparently for all his whoremongering, Robert had proven nothing more than an old cuckhold in his own bed. To Cersei’s brother, no less._

_Stannis finds himself torn between shame and disgust for his brother, and breathlessness at the future._

He is the trueborn heir.

_By the gods._

_The breathlessness shatters when Renly makes a claim for the throne._

_He rides to war once more, no longer a young man, but still skilled with a sword and with a will of iron._

_His marriage bed has been taken from him from the very first night._

_His wife, caught up in a madness he does not care to name._

_His sons, so much blood spilled in the bed of his keep._

_His daughter’s health, stolen from himself by his own hand._

_He will have this._

_He will have it for her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave a comment--I'd love to hear your thoughts!


	2. The Red Woman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, you're lucky this one happened so quickly! The comments I received for the first chapter were absolutely lovely, and I hope you'll continue to give me your feedback, as it is so appreciated.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Roe

_He calls his bannermen the moment he receives word from Ned Stark._

_The King is dead. No sons to follow._

_Long live the King._

_His bannermen flock to Renly instead._

_He curses them all, damns them to all seven hells, hoping just one might be real enough to burn them._

_He is their rightful King. Renly cannot possibly hope for a claim._

_But hope, he does. And others hope with him as no one hopes with Stannis._

_There are days of counting men, of numbers and numbers roiling in his head. He is no stranger to commanding an army at less than full strength. He can still do it._

_But with each life it will cost him, his numbers will dwindle further and further, and he wonders just how long it will be until it is only him. Just Stannis and Davos._

_He grits his teeth in disgust for the cheaply purchased loyalty of the Storm Lords._

_He balls his hands into fists at the thought of Robert; all the men who died serving him, and the men who died simply trying to reach him._

_His men would have chopped off their own heads if Robert had commanded it of them._

_Glorious rebels._

_Storm’s End seems a lifetime away, and now Renly’s war council meets there, the lords that should rightfully be here to serve him, and he wonders if they have all of them forgotten that the war table at Storm’s End was once his. That he once presided as lord over those meetings. That it was he who guarded the keep for a year with only five hundred men._

_That he guarded them, their lives, proved trustworthy with their service and bore every pain they suffered himself._

_Pain, of which Renly knows nothing._

_He did his duty to them without a second thought, and now they have abandoned him in turn, and all he can feel is the sharp, aching sting of betrayal._

_So when Selyse comes to him, an unnerving, burning glint in her eye, a woman cloaked in shadow and crimson at her side, after he sneers and tries to send the priestess from the keep—he has no need for her gods here—after he hears her strange words, her promises that mean little, but the odd, shimmering, powerful thread woven throughout her words, he listens._

_Not to the nonsense that is her blessed Lord of Light, her Azor Ahai._

_He listens to words of victory, of justice, of destiny._

_Of an army numbering thousands upon thousands._

_His mind is skeptical. He is a soldier, a hardened commander who has seen men cut open and bleeding their bowels out for hours on end, suffering endlessly cruel deaths. What does this woman know of battles and warfare?_

_And then, the fire._

_Hands reaching for his neck, and before he can jerk back, out of her reach, they have touched, and his words die with the shock of the burning heat in her fingertips as they guide his head, his eyes, to gaze into her flames._

_A battle in the snow, she says, and though later he will say he doesn’t know what he saw and will mean that he can’t quite remember, that this sorcery of hers will not remain still and clear in his mind’s eye, in that moment, he sees himself wielding a sword at the head of an army large enough to conquer realms, and he knows beyond a doubt that in that battle, his men will call him King._

~ 

Sansa Stark looks as though she is dying.

He still thinks she might be.

They have that woman of hers, the soldier with breasts and a blush who screamed foul, bloody murder at him, bellowing like a heifer and scratching the eyes out of his men, flailing for her sword. 

The stupid fool thought to fight his whole army for just one swing at him, and now she is locked in a disused bedchamber, pounding at doors, and floor, and everything she can find, held down by watchmen and Baratheon men alike until she is a sobbing heap on the floor, and he thinks this place is cursed to leech every last bit of sense from a body until there is nothing but the madness within.

 _Renly._

Yes, the woman’s bared teeth and wild eyes make him think of his brother; the fool.

_He had such sweet eyes as a baby. Sweet until the day he died. Their mother’s pride and joy._

Tinged with treason and dishonor.

The Stark girl is her own heap on the floor of her brother’s chambers, not yet allowed a room of her own, because gods girl, she’s been gone for _years._

She should, by all accounts, still be in King’s Landing right now.

She should be off somewhere with the wretched Imp, with her _husband._

_She should be dead and buried in a lion’s shroud._

But she’s here, and his men are no longer ready to march, because he needs to hear her story and so does Jon Snow.

The boy had stared at her in the yard as though he’d seen a ghost, had reached out to touch her, only to pull his hand back as though she had burned him with fire when he did.

But when her legs finally gave out, refusing to carry her any farther, his arms had been steady for her and ready to break her fall.

_Good lad. Good brother._

Robert would have left him to either come to his senses or freeze in the snow.

Jon builds a warmer fire for her, gives her a blanket, calls for a hot drink, and so slowly, life returns to her bit by bit. Some color, deeper breaths. Her hands cease their trembling.

_And what a story she tells._

The Lannisters. 

Olenna.

Baelish.

_He always was a snake._

And Bolton. 

She doesn’t dwell on the Bolton bastard for long, never says more than that they married and that the Tarth woman helped her escape, but her fingers clench, her voice wavers, and now that her color is returning and she is allowing the blanket to slip lower than her ears, purple, mottled bruises in the process of turning yellow-green are clearly visible on her cheeks, her eyes, her neck.

 _Her hands._

_Her wrists._

_There is a nasty cut on her left jaw._

_Each mark is artfully placed._

_Soldiers do not fight like that._

His lip curls in disgust. Bolton. The _bastard._ Half lordling, half lowborn, and that he should be permitted to treat a highborn lady, a _Stark,_ like this—

It’s shameful. 

All the while she watches him, stares at him as though she has never seen a man before, and he does his best to avert his eyes from both of Ned Stark’s children in the room.

He doesn’t think he can bear to look either of them square in the eye just now.

Because with each line she adds to her story, all he can feel is warm, furious, sickening relief coursing through him fast enough to make his stomach turn.

_Sansa Stark. Thank the gods._

He’ll pray to each and every god he hasn’t believed in since he was a boy if it will only prove that the girl is the gift he thinks she is. Gods above, Sansa Stark just came back from the dead, and it seems the hope of her has brought _him_ back too; she is real, and tangible, and not some crooned promise from a fire god he isn’t certain if he’s ever truly believed in.

She is Sansa Stark, and he needs no faith to know what this means for him. For his army. For his march to free the North.

When he does look up, shifts his eyes to Jon Snow’s, he finds the boy’s gaze fixed on his own form. Stannis has remained silent this whole stretch of time; has allowed brother to question sister, and sister brother, because they’ve each of them grown up almost entirely separate from the other, and it must be strange.

He thinks it would be strange for him, had he and either of his brothers ever contemplated an embrace. 

But now, now Jon Snow is looking at him, the Lord Commander is looking at him, Ned Stark’s son is _looking at him,_ and he knows why, just as Jon Snow knows exactly what he has been thinking.

It will be well done. A Stark at Winterfell, beloved of her people. The North behind him, numbers for his army that he so desperately needs.

The proud Northern lords will not follow their rightful King, so be it. 

They _will_ follow a trueborn Stark. 

Their houses have always fought side by side. Together they can fight the Lannisters, can hold the wall against the white-walkers. The Targaryen girl can be dealt with in time, and they will have the numbers to meet that challenge when it comes.

Only, they are not Robert and Ned. She is Sansa Stark, and she cannot lead an army by his side, cannot rally the Northerners behind her own banners, and that presents a problem that can be solved only one way.

_A grim thought. He grits his teeth as it arrives in him. Gods, but his wife is only days in her grave, the air still smells of the smoke of her funeral pyre, her glorious sacrifice._

_And Sansa Stark is too young; she looks broken beyond repair._

Jon knows it too; knows the duty that lies before his sister and his King. He can see it in the boy’s eyes, and he wonders at how far the young Lord Commander has come from his days of youth if he too can think such things while looking at the tired, broken, wretched creature kneeling by the fire before them.

The young Snow says not a word about it when he finally sees his sister off to bed, and neither does Stannis.

The girl is wounded, exhausted, and she needs sleep and a hot meal before she faces another moment of waking, another duty put before her. She need not concern herself with her future just yet. They can afford her that, at least.

The rest can keep for another day. They will not march for Winterfell tonight

~

_The fire priestess—Melisandre—proves herself to be unlike anything he has ever known before._

_There is a deep, tremoring voice that follows him at all times now, an unease that settles over his keep, though with it comes a surge of something…something unnamable, but that feels like a stranger power than Renly will ever hope to possess._

_But somehow, though she shines crimson in the dark and serves a god of fire, he never expected the burnings._

_First, they are small; just grates in his halls that go unnoticed, a few more fires to add to the ones that already burn, doing a poor job of casting light of Dragonstone’s dark halls._

_Then, the idols._

_She suggests it, and he scoffs. He has no love for the gods of his youth, for weirwoods so prized in the North or the great sept at King’s Landing, but his men are a superstitious lot, as are most Westerosi, and to burn their idols—_

_Does she mean to rob him of every last man he has to his name? He snarls it at her, contempt rising in him._

_A foreigner, and what does she know of this war?_

_But the days creep into moons, and he needs those accursed bannermen, damn Renly to seven hells._

_And it seems he cannot sway them on his own._

_So the idols burn and he shouts her worthless chant for the people of Dragonstone to hear, a burning sword clutched in his hand while he plays the part of her blessed hero that he doesn’t for a moment believe himself to be._

_And the master who raised him falls to the floor of his council chamber with a heavy thud that he thinks he’ll be hearing in his mind for years to come, while the red priestess from Asshai drinks poison like all she can taste is the wine, and he cannot breathe._

_He doesn’t know what he believes, has tried his damndest not to believe in_ anything _since he watched a longed-for ship go down in jagged pieces in Shipbreaker Bay, but he cannot deny the power of life and death before his very eyes._

_He grows tense with it, uneasy. The bannermen have still not come to his side, and he needs them now, damn it, before Tywin Lannister has time to rally his full strength._

_The wretched woman follows him like a hound tails her master, and croons nonsense at him, sings to him that he is her King, like a pet name a lady might give her prized mare._

_He does not stop her, though a part of him wonders just when she thinks he became hers._

_She sighs to him that he is troubled, and he wants to reprimand her for presuming to know his thoughts._

_She tells him to have faith, and for a moment he hates her and wishes the poison had taken her and left him his maester in her stead._

_Anger, and frustration, and something that feels entirely too close to approaching defeat rises within him, and he shouts, wants to bellow with it. Renly’s treachery has made him strong—too strong to be beaten in the field. And the Lannister army will be impossible to defeat without the men whose allegiance rightly belongs to him._

_And the witch tells him—commands him—to give himself up to her precious Lord of Light._

_“I’ve said the words, damn you!”_

_And he has, feeling all the stupider for it. He feels a bloody fool now; a wretch who held a flaming sword in his hands and shouted lunacy to all his men._

_And Robert, why, Robert, must this have fallen to him? He didn’t want it, has no need for it, is_ suffering _for it. The man did nothing but drink and whore, and yet he couldn’t get even one sickly child on the wife he said his vows to, Lannister or no?_

_So now he is here, exiled to Dragonstone and gazing on a painted table that shows him no path to victory, and Melisandre of Asshai stands naked close beside him._

_He gasps, loses his breath and looks quickly away when he turns to find her there, and in such a state._

_“You must give all of yourself.”_

_Gods, he’s never seen a woman so bare in all his life._

_He sneers at her. “I have a wife.”_

_And his thoughts sneer at him in return as he thinks of Selyse, envisions her in her tower praying to Melisandre’s god with her hands too close to the fire, reddening with the heat._

_What would she say about her Lord of Light now, eh?_

_Selyse does not look like Melisandre. He doesn’t rightly know exactly what Selyse looks like beneath her nightdress, but he doesn’t need to see her to know she doesn’t look like this; doesn’t look like the fire priestess he is not allowing his eyes to linger on. Her breasts are not heavy, and round, and pale. Her hair is not long, and red, and flowing._

_Gods, when she stands here, bare as the day she was born and so brazenly unashamed, she pulls him into a dancing weakness, a place where he can control his body, but not the rebel that is his mind._

_He could have dreams about that red hair, if he allowed himself._

_But it is no matter, because he has not made his vows to her. He has made his vows to Selyse. He has cloaked his wife, brought her under his protection, had her maidenhead for his own, and she has born him a child, if not a son._

_He is hers, and she is his, and no fire priestess can change it._

_But she comes closer, wraps soft, heated, womanly arms around him, and he cannot remember the last time a woman touched him like this; does not think anyone ever has._

_His wife is sickly, yes. Sickly of mind. And she does disgust him, though not for her lack of beauty, or the age she has gained._

_She keeps their dead sons in her chambers, whispers sweetness to them every night. And she locks Shireen away in a tower like the greyscale still runs rampant over every inch of her skin._

_She comes to his bed willingly when he asks her, when he is home and the master tells him it is an opportune time to get a child on her. Does her duty to him the few times a year he demands it. But she does it with deadened eyes, and while he does not care for loud, giggling, impassioned whores, he would like to feel as though his wife is not praying for mercy from whatever god she serves while he is moving in her, trying to plant a son in her womb._

_A son. She has given him no sons. Only stillborns and death._

_A son—and Melisandre whispers the promise in his ear so eagerly, very nearly sweetly, and there is a smell about her, a smoke that clouds every thought in his mind as he repeats it back to her in dumb disbelief._

_“A son?”_

_A red priestess from Asshai is naked, clinging to him, and he is torn between wanting to throw her from him in disgust, and waiting anxiously to see what she will do next._

_A son._

_To strengthen his claim, to secure the realm for the years to come after he has gone the way of his fathers._

_A son, baseborn like Robert’s but proof enough that he is able, because he knows very well that his living brother believes he cannot, while his dead brother went to his grave knowing it for sure._

_Her tongue slips from her lips, settles at his ear and does something hot and sinfully pleasurable to the shell of it, the skin behind, the beginning of his jaw and neck, lips sucking, tongue bathing, teeth scraping. All burning as flames._

_He has bedded his wife, gotten more children on her than he can count, only to watch her bleed them away, and yet he has never felt a woman’s touch like this._

_There is skin._

_Her lips on his, sucking, biting._

_Hands. His are on her hips, squeezing._

_All the ships fall off the table, the Red Woman’s body as deadly as Shipbreaker Bay._

_His feet struggle for purchase, his hands are clumsy with haste._

_Heat._

_Burning._

_Fire._

_She scorches him, melts him to formless nothing with the scalding wetness that she uses to surround him, starting with his cock and spreading like a vicious spark to every inch of him, and with every savage thrust he feels himself crumble to ashes a little bit faster._

_He hurries. Is unaccustomed to delaying himself, and in truth, has no wish to join himself to her for any longer than it takes for him to growl and shout his way through a release that proves more searingly painful than anything else._

_And pleasure. Yes, there is pleasure too, and it races along his spine rapidly enough for him to jolt with it._

_As he pulls himself out of her, feels a wet gush of fire follow him, he thinks grimly of Robert._

_There is pleasure in adultery, pleasure in taking a woman that is not his own. A woman who has promised him a son who will be a bastard._

_His lip curls painfully in disgust._

_He cannot bear to think what his brothers would say, to learn that he has at last weakened, and taken a whore to his bed._

~

He makes himself scarce during the days that follow. Leaves Jon Snow to his own business, and knows that the boy will find him when he is ready.

Knows that he will receive what is due to him, whether he truly desires it or not.

_He never asked for this crown._

_Gold is cold and heavy on the head._

_But so long as he is King, he has a duty to the realm._

And he will honor it.

He sees Sansa Stark in very fleeting glimpses. Watches her take her meals from the other end of the room, watches her walk with her brother to the godswood.

She is pale, and too thin, and her healing bruises have given her spots of sickly yellow.

But she survived the Boltons, which is more than many, many men can say. She survived the Lannisters, King’s Landing, Littlefinger.

She seems unslayable.

He hopes her trials have given her a backbone of tempered steel. She will need it to march in the company of a King.

Jon Snow does not discuss things with him before he first brings the matter of marriage before his sister.

Stannis knows this, because all of Castle Black hears the shouting.

_Shout._

There is only one, and it is cut short, as though someone one sucked all the air from the girl’s lungs. Then there are footsteps, and his eyes wander to the snow that lies thick outside his window, to see a girl with hair as red as any he’s ever seen walk pale, and stiff, and brittle, striding to the godswood once more, her brother at her heels.

She does not say a word at dinner. 

But Jon Snow finds plenty to say after.

They bar themselves in the Lord Commander’s chambers, and Stannis tells the boy he was a fool to say anything without obtaining his leave first.

_What if he had no intention of wedding the girl?_

But they both know he cannot afford to do anything but, so the point is moot.

There is, however the matter of her _husband._

Ramsay sends a vile letter that the Stark girl reads. Stannis tells Jon he will mount the boy’s head on a spike, and the boy nods. A betrothal then, to placate the Northern lords and sway them to his cause. 

When he returns with Ramsay Bolton’s head, then they may have a wedding. 

_But Sansa won’t._

Jon whispers it, his eyes closing painfully, and the King, just for a moment, can see a bastard boy who has at last regained just one member of the family he’s never truly possessed.

“Tell your sister I’ll not harm her.”, Stannis tells him, and the boy nods, says he has, so Stannis bids him to tell her again.

He never raised a hand to Selyse, though damn it all, there had been times she’d made him want to.

He’s never raised his hand to any woman except once, more than half his army gone up in flames in Blackwater Bay. _Flames,_ and no Melisandre, no precious _‘Lord of Light’,_ in sight.

He remembers his hands at her throat; remembers wandering if he were to squeeze hard enough, would he be able to force the portion of himself still trapped inside of her, burning?

_His seed, though already birthed, his dead brother the proof. The sin that keeps him chained to her._

But never again. He has sworn never to raise his hand against a woman ever again.

Jon nods, and as more days pass, Stannis grows impatient.

The girl is wounded, broken, yes, but he has a _war_ to fight. And aside from Boltons, there is this terror beyond the wall that the Night’s Watch speaks of with such conviction, and he believes them.

_He needs those men. He needs the North. And the girl is a Stark, born and bred to do her duty._

He will make it as painless as possible for her. He will be no brute. 

The girl is quiet though, keeps to her room and eats little.

So quiet, that it gives him pause to find him standing in the door to his study very late in the pale afternoon.

_Everything is so grey and white here, so winter, but she and Melisandre, they are two flickering spots of color, one fire and flame, one golden-red like the dawn rising over the Stormlands._

“You want to wed me.”

She gives no prelude.

She gives no ‘Your Grace.’

Her voice has changed now, since he last heard it so clearly. It no longer shakes, though it is very quiet.

“I need Northern men.”

Let her not think he desires her body, or even her womb particularly. They will do their duty, will try for sons, but he doubts anything much will come of it.

_He is not as young as he once was, past his prime, and he has never been able to father sons._

Her eyes aren’t moving. They hardly blink, and his own feel compelled to study them, the strange wall that stands icier than the one that guards against the wildlings inside of her. 

The girl sucks in a deep breath. It does not tremble.

“I want something in return." 

_There now._ There is that note of steel that he hoped she would possess, even if it is small, and he had _not_ hoped it would begin with her wielding at him.

But she is a Stark—her name powerful and old, and there is honor due to her for that. 

“Oh?”

His voice sounds as it does when he speaks to his men, to Davos, and he remembers with disdain Robert, with a fair whore on one arm, a dark, exotic one on the other, somehow convincing them with honeyed words that they were each the most beautiful in all the Seven Kingdoms.

He has no honeyed words, and knows little of the sensibilities possessed by women.

She will have to make do with the curtesy of his full attention to her own words. He is listening, though he will not swear anything to her until he has heard her request. 

_And oh, what a request._

“I want Ramsay Bolton alive. Bring him to me, and I will wed you.”

Young, and bruised, but not trembling. She has set her jaw in a fashion that makes her look rather less Tully and rather more Stark.

He gives the girl a hard look. Tells her that if he brings her the Bolton bastard _alive,_ she cannot very well wed _him,_ can she?

To which she responds in an even, icy tone and an unreadable expression, that she does not mean to _keep_ him alive for any longer than it takes the boy to die before her eyes.

_Well now._

He rolls words over in his mouth, over his tongue, seeking a reply.

_Lady Stark. What a request._

“I cannot guarantee his life against my archers—”

“I will not wed you if he dies by any hand but mine.”

She knows what she is doing, he is certain of it. Knows that she is testing him, asking a great thing of him. Knows that she is telling the man who wishes to be her husband that she is going to _kill_ her previous husband first.

She knows she is demanding a great deal from a King who cannot afford to say no.

She is holding a knife to his throat, Sansa Stark, and threatening him with it without ever truly touching the blade.

So he nods. He does not promise her; _cannot_ truly. But he will command his men not to touch a hair on the bastard’s head.

Northern troops file into Castle Black in the days after ravens with news of the betrothal are sent out, and yes, he has his army now. 

Sansa Stark watches him mount his horse; he watches her do it, and realizes with a start that she is truly uncertain of who will win.

And he shakes his head.

He has smaller numbers, yes, but he has fought longer, harder battles than this one. Has held Storm’s End against the reach, fought Victarian Greyjoy and won.

_What battles has the Bastard of Bolton won, that he should fear him?_

He will use no archers when he storms Winterfell. And he will bring the boy to Sansa Stark, _alive._

~

_He never once allows himself to think of the Lady Melisandre as a whore again._

_Never allows himself to think of her as anything but a priestess; an advisor._

_When she shows him the swell in her belly, shows him where his seed has festered, he swallows and grits his teeth, remembering far too much heat, and pain, and a terrible pleasure that finds him in his nightmares._

_When she tells him what must be done, whispers to him that his victory grows within her, he does not question it._

_He sends her ashore._

_And he remembers, that when his brother offered him a peach, he’d snapped that they had not met to eat a wretched piece of fruit._

_He has had his fill of pleasant things now; glutted himself on them. Pleasurable things that are attained through dishonor and sin. He is bloated with them, and he thinks that even one more bite will make him sick._

_No. He thinks that he will never again be able to properly enjoy the sweetened taste of fruit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave a comment--I'd love to hear what you think!


	3. Lady Stark

_Sansa knows that this isn’t how it is supposed to be._

_She knows the bruises, the careful, almost pretty cuts, are not supposed to mark her._

_The scars that paint her, reminders of her time in King’s Landing._

_None of it was ever meant to be._

_She is not supposed to be locked away in a chamber of her own father’s keep, kept like a doll for her husband to lavish his…attentions on…whenever he sees fit._

_She knows this._

_But sometimes, when he bends her over and rips out long, red chunks of hair, winding them around his fingers and tucking them close to his heart, when he makes Theon watch from the corner and he strips her bare and jams fingers and gods know what else in places they surely don’t belong, she forgets just what things are supposed to be like._

_Sometimes, this is all she can remember, and so this is all there has ever been._

_All there can ever be._

_It is almost bliss to sink into that nothingness, that quiet place that leeches the struggle right out of her. Except when she comes back, she is made violently ill by her disappearance, and is struck until she can’t breathe, choking on her own blood for disgusting him._

_When she escapes, when there is a brief, gods-sent moment and she takes it, Theon by her side, a woman who swears by the old gods and the new to keep her safe from every harm, she thinks it is a dream for hours on end, and wonders how her husband will choose to punish her when she wakes._

_Even a dream of escape is a sin, and Ramsay can always tell._

_But when she finally realizes that she is, in fact, awake; that she is running, escaping, right now, is safe right now, the relief does not come like she thought it would._

_He will come for her._

_He will kill for her._

_He will keep her as his own from this day, until the end of her days._

_Her waking dreams have turned to nightmares._

_~_

The siege is made twice as long as it needs be.

He will not fire a single, bloody arrow. 

By the time they breach the walls, swords drawn, Roose Bolton dead on the ground, his men are cold and battle-weary.

But they are good, loyal men, and the bastard is nothing but a _child,_ playing at the games of men.

Melisandre tells him to burn the boy, to offer him up as a sacrifice to her lord, even as he holds his sword at the boy’s throat to keep him still.

The boy is smiling.

The boy is laughing.

_They did not come soon enough to save the youngest Stark. Have found him slaughtered in the yard instead, dressed in his father’s colors._

Were they in the Stormlands, he would be heating a knife over a fire to _castrate_ the boy for senseless cruelty.

But he is in the North. There will be no castration.

So he denies her. Neither will there be a fire.

_Selyse, her bones lost, only smoke rising in the frigid air._

_The painted table. He’d given himself fully. Too fully._

_Sansa Stark._ She has made a demand of him, and yes, he is a King and she has an older brother to force her hand, she has no real power to refuse him.

But he has all but made a vow to her.

And he will not break faith with yet another wife for the promises of Melisandre’s precious Lord of Light. No matter how broken a child the Stark girl truly is.

His men bind the boy as he sheathes his sword.

No, he tells Melisandre. The boy will not burn.

This boy’s justice isn’t his to exact.

Jon Snow rides for days to Winterfell, sends word with a raven in reply to the news of a Baratheon victory, and so they wait.

_The Starks are returning to Winterfell._

And all the people of the North utter _‘Gods be praised.’_

When Jon Snow enters the keep, his sister so tall and thin at his side, there is a palpable hush from all who have gathered to see.

It’s like Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully reborn, and he cannot tell if the old washerwomen wish to laugh, or weep.

She doesn’t stop, Sansa. Doesn’t breathe the Winterfell air deep or feast her eyes on its walls as her brother does. She is off her horse with scarcely a second to lose, striding, searching, coming to a stop before him without so much as a bow. 

She doesn’t say a word, but her eyes are a demand made anew.

_Where is he?_

She is _itching,_ he can see it, can feeling it rolling off of her in waves, and it makes him wary of her in a way that he has never thought to be wary of a girl who looks as though she hasn’t eaten a proper meal in a year.

_Gods, but there is a freezing ice in her, a fire that will not burn out until it consumes what it wants._

Her need to see the boy unnerves him, as it did at Castle Black. But he looks at the fading bruises on her once more, finds the slowly closing slashes at her jaw, and thinks that it is perhaps not so strange after all.

“My Lady.”

Still she stands; still she waits.

Davos is looking to him, Melisandre is looking to him, and he realizes with a start that he has told _no one_ of the promise he never quite made. They none of them know but Sansa Stark. 

_He is not going to tell them now._

Not when they look at her with careful gazes already, half-expecting her to shatter like ice. The girl is to be his Queen, she will need to be trusted—better yet if she can make them love her.

 _Love her, as they will never love him._

She cannot give them madness when they want beauty and grace instead.

_They will not tolerate another Selyse. This he knows. Selyse, Melisandre, if the Stark girl sways at all, he will become the King of madwomen, nothing more._

So he beckons her inside, and calls for a hot meal.

It is not what she wants.

It is not what she expects. 

It is not what she thinks he promised her at Castle Black, though he never said the words.

She follows him, nevertheless. 

_Good girl._

She knows what a duty is. 

There is a feast that night, though he makes certain the food is plain and does not abound. 

The words of the keep, _Winter Is Coming,_ have never rang with more truth.

She is stone, and waits until nearly every man is deep in his cups, a war story to tell.

He does not speak to her.

She keeps her eyes tight to him.

He does not meet them.

_She needs to wait. Needs to wait._

He would tell Shireen to be patient, but Shireen would not be so coldly insistent, and Sansa Stark is most definitely not his daughter. 

He leaves her instead to her brother’s council for the night, and in turn, seeks only his own. 

Eventually she is given no choice but to see herself to a chamber, to bed. Drink is flowing heavily, and soon she will be the only woman in a room of battle-fresh men. Not a single one of them would ever touch her. They live under the threat of losing their hands if they ever try—she is a _Stark,_ and a child—but all the same, his men have no more need of her tonight.

He can see on her face that she is displeased with him. Burning, fuming, believes he has failed at his single task.

Is still burning with it when he knocks at her door well into the early hours of the morning.

“Lady Stark.” 

_She has not been sleeping._

She is dressed for it though, covered in white that only serves to color her bruises a shade darker than they truly are, wrapped in a woolen thing that looks warmer than a fire.

_Red hair in every which direction, enough to burn all night._

And a furrow in her brow that has made its home there since she first walked through the gates of her father’s home.

She stands, stares, does not reply by calling him _‘Your Grace.’_

_Strange girl._

But he holds out a sheathed dagger to her, all the same.

She looks at it, and he asks very quietly if there was, perhaps, someone amongst the captured she wished to see. 

He thinks, for a moment, that she is going to faint. 

Her eyes _burn_ into him hotter than Melisandre’s touch has ever been. He grits his teeth to keep from wincing at the feel of them.

“You kept him? He’s here, truly?”

Her voice rings with a quiet, whispered disbelief.

Did she think he wouldn’t, he wants to ask, but doesn’t because he can already see in her expression the answer he would receive.

_She knows she has no power here; knew it at Castle Black, when she demanded things of him like an already-crowned Queen. She knows she is as good as wed to him already, and she never believed for even a minute that he would honor a request laced with a threat._

He shifts the dagger closer to her, watches her take it, and bids her only to follow him.

_Sansa cannot breathe, her air has stuck so hard and painful in her chest._

_One door, two doors, and it is with sickening dread that she wonders, no, it cannot be, but yes, it is. Solely by accident, they have kept him in her old rooms._

_Her old prison._

He almost reaches out to her, think she looks as though she will soon be sick, and so watches her carefully as he comes to a stop outside the door, a careful look cast down the hall in each direction.

Sansa Stark cannot be caught with a dagger in Ramsay Snow’s room.

Tomorrow, an irresponsible guard will have allowed the bastard to kill himself, and they will say no more about it until the day they both die.

But her fierceness, it seems, her bold, demanding ice, has quite abandoned her now.

She has shrunk from the door, will not touch it, and if she clenches her fingers any tighter around his dagger, she won’t need to unsheathe it to make her fingerbones bleed.

_She cannot do it, heart pounding nauseatingly in her chest. She holds the weapon, sent an army of men to kill him with only the promise of her hand in marriage, and yet she finds herself too afraid. And it disgusts her._

He knows the wildness that has come to her eyes. Has seen it in a thousand soldiers, hundreds of hanged men. It’s the look of someone too afraid to move, too petrified by shock and terrible fear to even think of drawing their sword, and it is a death sentence for all who are ordered to fight in the name of their King.

It’s the look of a man a hair’s breadth from desertion, and he does not like to see in on her.

She’s a bloody Stark. Surely Ned put some backbone into her? 

Then stops himself. 

The candlelight makes her bruises shimmer like untempered steel.

There’s enough backbone in her to keep her standing here, alive while others are dead.

He grinds his teeth and brings his own hand to the door. He meant to give her the dagger and wait outside to keep watch, but now—

Now he is not yet ready to return her to her rooms, defeated. She has ordered a thing done; now is the time to see it through. 

She follows him with only a moment’s pause.

_The room is darker than she remembers, and she wonders if in her madness, she conjured her own shapes to fill the dark so she would not be so alone. Now it is almost entirely empty, save for a chair in the middle, where a slumped figure sits, and if she did not know better, she would think that he was dead._

_The dagger feels cold and heavy in the palm of her hand. She has played at being strong, has played at a game she doesn’t quite know the rules of, but she doesn’t want to play any longer._

_And he lifts his head, and he smiles at her._

He watches the girl, watches the boy, tries to make himself scarce by the door, where he will at least be able to hear someone coming. He has sent the guards from this hall, knowing they questioned his senses as he did it, has forbidden even Melisandre from this place, but anyone could be roaming the keep in the dark. Soldier or ranger; neither can know.

She peers at the boy, and he leers back at her, and he watches the bottom of her nightdress tremble with each shaking breath she takes.

Then the boy brings his head up, widens his smile, and there is a croon to his voice as he whispers _Hello Sansa, my dearest wife._

She flinches, steps back as though he has struck at her, and the dagger in her hand falls to the floor.

_Gods, she hears a thousand ‘Sansa’s’ echoing through her ears, making her whole skull tremble. Each one carries with it a different pain, a new bruise that has already faded its way from her skin, and for a moment she is the one tied down, and he is the one with the dagger._

“Pick it up.”

He _hates_ to see her shrink from this _boy_ who is nothing, has no name while her own is as old as the sun. She is Sansa Stark—the bloody Lannisters didn’t kill her. This boy isn’t fit to feed her horse.

He doesn’t wait to watch her do it; strides quickly to the boy instead, takes a handful of his filthy shirt between his fingers and tears it, stuffs it tightly between the boy’s teeth, stretching his jaw to a width that he knows to be painful, then locates the largest vein on the side of the bastard boy’s neck. 

A bloody, violent death.

A soft place on his stomach, a long, painful one.

The top of his thigh, no death, but excruciating agony if the blade is dug in deep.

He shows her, imparts a soldier’s wealth of targets to her in only a minute’s time, and watches her eyes widen and never once stray from his fingers, his gestures. He does not touch the boy, the wretched beast will go unharmed but for Sansa Stark, but he is thorough with her choices, finding all the places best suited to radiate pain through every inch of bone.

The Bastard of Bolton will die at her pleasure, and none of his foolish whimpering around the makeshift gag will save him.

_She watches him, and is made breathless by it. This one will make him bleed out so slowly, he tells her, that he won’t even know it when he dies; will feel only as though he is falling asleep. He gestures to Ramsay’s thigh as he says the words, at a tiny, almost imperceptible place very near to where he takes his pleasure, and her eyes cannot stray from the man’s hands as they continue to wander her husband’s body, teaching her death by bloody death, and torture to accompany it._

_How many men has this man killed?_

_She is…horrified. She wants to be horrified, but—_

_But there is a…a sort of…suspension. She is caught up in it; in the fascination of it all. Does Ramsay know all of this; all these different ways to make a man surrender his lifeblood?_

_Or is it only the soldier before her, so tall over Ramsay that her husband is beginning to quake in her chair?_

_She felt helpless only a moment ago, a knife in her hand, but nowhere to put it. She could have driven it into his chest, but who is to say if she would have found his heart or not?_

_She does not like to think if she would have had the strength to do it twice._

_Now she examines him with a sort of morbid fascination clouding her. So many places she could make him bleed; so many tiny holes she could poke into his skin._

_Is this what Arya always felt?_

_There is a man in here with her, a soldier who has fought through too many famous battles to still be alive, and yet here he is. She remembers hiding from him. Fleeing from his wrath in King’s Landing, Queen Cersei close beside._

_Now he is here with her, and, if she is not mistaken, the only one who knows what she will do this night._

_And perhaps the next night or the next, he will take her to wife, she will be once more wed, and they will share a marriage bed._

_She shivers._

_She will share her bed with this man, who knows so many different ways to make her bleed._

_It would happen so slowly, she remembers of the place on Ramsay’s thigh, the place on her own, that she would never even wake. She would just sleep and sleep, and never wake again._

_But Jon, Father, they always said he was an honorable man, just, and she has seen no hint of Joffrey in him yet._

_He is a puzzle she cannot figure._

_He has stopped speaking, apparently having taught her all she needs to know about both sentencing a man to death, and wielding the very blade, and Ramsay looks more terrified than she has ever seen him. It sends a fierce bolt of satisfying victory through her veins._

_Stannis Baratheon, on the other hand, is looking at her, waiting for her, and for a moment, she does not know where to begin._

He watches her frown at him so, thinks with a savagery that catches him unawares that if she wants to kill a man, she had best understand how.

He is waiting. Wandering. Holding his breath to see which she will choose.

_Who is Sansa Stark?_

She wavers only a moment longer, thinking, weighing everything he has spoken to her, and then her eyes harden and he knows she has chosen. So slowly, so gracefully, she takes her steps and kneels before the man who will be her husband for only minutes longer.

And quite suddenly, it strikes him that this is perhaps the most unjust thing he has ever done, killing a woman’s husband so that he may take her for his own, and yet also the most _just_ thing he has ever done—avenging Sansa Stark’s honor where her father cannot. 

Better—teaching her how to avenge it herself.

He thinks Ned Stark would approve.

_Lyanna always was a terror to behold._

She is slow, methodical, and she takes the time to carefully tuck a section of Tully-red hair behind a pale ear before unsheathing the dagger with a quiet _hiss._

His blood runs cold like it hasn’t since he was a boy, making his first kill.

A breath, he watches it rise in her, then fall.

And if he had blinked, he would have missed it. She has cut the boy so deftly, so _delicately,_ it is almost an invisible wound, but yes, there it is just on the inside of his thigh.

He won’t feel a thing. The blood will just _drip, drip,_ out of him, as it is doing now, and eventually it will become a stream until there is nothing left to flow. 

_Her newfound calm unnerves him. Her coldness as she does not even bother to stay; bother to see._

The boy gives one last whimpering cry before they back out of the room, and he closes the door softly behind them.

She stands very still for a moment, swaying, then sheathes his dagger and returns it to him.

But her eyes, they have lost some of the steel, some of the icy hardness that she carried with her before, and it makes her seem softer, not quite so pale and gaunt, and he cannot decide if she looks even _more_ wounded, or less.

Sansa Stark is not a stone; not when she knows her demons are dead and gone.

He says nothing until she does; until they are at the door to her chamber, and he is breathing a sigh of relief at having met no one in the hall.

She asks him in wooden tones when they are to wed.

Soon, he tells her. And yes, it will be soon. He needs these Northern lords to fight whatever lies beyond the wall, to fight the ever-growing Lannister forces against him, and if he is to have the North, he must have Sansa Stark as well.

She nods.

Turns. 

Opens the door to her chambers and makes to go to bed.

Then turns, and thanks him. 

_Thanks him._

And she calls him _‘Your Grace.’_

~

_She shatters when Jon tells her she will marry._

_Gods, no. She says a thousand prayers in one breath, one exhale that echoes through the castle, a shout against the frozen air. A prayer to the Mother, the Stranger—_

_Gods, no._

_When he tells her it will be Stannis, she does not know whether to laugh or cry._

_Remembers hiding from him in a holdfast below King’s Landing. Cersei and her disdain, her cool, calm, mad acceptance of the death Stannis Baratheon would bring to them all. Fire, and death, and rape._

_She remembers longing for it for just a moment. Longing for it while she ran from the sword that would kill them all, ran to her chambers to flee all the hands reaching for her._

_Longing for Stannis Baratheon to kill every last one of them, even if it meant her too._

_She had wept when a Lannister victory had come, though not at the sight of Tyrion Lannister, alive and well._

_Not then._

_There are a thousand voices swirling inside of her. Jon tells her that Father supported his claim, died to make him King._

_Jon himself has bent the knee._

_She has not heard the man speak hardly two words together, but she watches his soldiers go about their business too carefully around him. Thinks he must be a very hard man for the way people talk of him._

_An old man._

_A plain man._

_A man Jon tells her she will marry, because Stannis Baratheon is the only hope to save them all._

_~_

She spends the night pressing her back against her bedchamber door, struggling for each and every breath.

As the heartbeats tick by, she wonders idly just how long it will take Ramsay Bolton to die.

~

Davos wakes him early in the morning, before the sun is yet in the sky, though he is up with it almost daily, besides.

_The sun rises to shine red, and the Bastard of Bolton is dead._

He tells his men to clean up the mess. Tells them to burn the body, as he knows Jon Snow will bid him as soon as the boy hears.

Tells them not to give him over to one of Melisandre’s funeral pyres. To burn him in a heap instead, unnamed. His bones will scatter to the wind, and no one will ever miss an errant Snow in the frozen North.

The day passes with a reorganization of Winterfell, aided by Ned Stark’s only present son.

They burn the Bolton banners.

They execute any remaining traitors.

They arm and reward their loyal warriors.

The Northern lords bend the knee once more, and he is King Stannis Baratheon in the North.

Sansa Stark is nowhere to be seen all day.

Nowhere to be seen that night, when every man gathers for his supper and drinks to a victory well-won once more.

He stands at his window that night beside his bed, does not care to lay down in it, not while his mind is swimming with a thousand things that need to be done. 

There are no lights in the castle; every candle has been snuffed.

_Except._

One very small light flickers just across the way, in a window situated across the yard. The hand that holds it is small as Shireen’s but the hair looks as though it has been caught in the flames.

Sansa Stark stares down the moon like a direwolf, her face dancing like a spark in the wind. 

He supposes she has heard, supposes she can still smell the ash that was once her husband, and he watches as she breathes in deep. Wonders what she said to her brother when he told her the bastard was dead. 

And it’s like she hears his thoughts as clearly as if it were speech. 

Her fire-hair turns, her Tully eyes reflect the small flame she holds in her hands as they lock on him.

He wonders if it feels hot against her face, though she is surrounded by cold Northern wind. 

And there they are, just they two. And they know. And they do not speak.

_They will not speak of it ever again._

_But they will always, always remember the night when winter and fury killed Ramsay Snow._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo...yeah. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. But anyway, leave a comment, cause I'd love to hear what you think!


	4. Weirwood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Weeeellll...guess what I just finished??? Here ya go, at long last, Chapter 5! Sorry about the long wait guys, but there was...stuff.
> 
> Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy, and don't forget to tell me what you think!
> 
> Roe

He tells Lady Sansa they are to wed in three days’ time. 

He tells the lady Melisandre that they will do it the old way, before the gods of Westeros. He has an army of Northern men who pray to their weirwoods and a southern army who worship the Seven—to follow the lady Melisandre’s council is one thing, a _profitable_ thing; to burn her pyres is a necessary thing, a punishment that goes only to those who would meet the same fate, regardless of the gods they serve.

But he will be wed before his own gods—whether he believes in them or not.

_He tells her that she will not interfere with the goings on of his marriage bed; not as she did with the last._

He won’t have a Red priestess from Asshai accosting Lady Sansa with her sorcery and muttering incantations over them as they do their duty.

_Not this time._

She bows herself, murmurs _‘My King,’_ and he wonders at her complacence. Wonders if he will live to rue it.

_Wildfire in Blackwater Bay._

But he doesn’t change his mind. In three days’ time he will wed Sansa Stark, and they will do their duty well enough without the help of Melisandre’s blessed lord to see them through.

_Lady Sansa need never know just what the Red Woman prays over him in her efforts to win him the throne._

_He wishes he could unhear it sometimes, and so Sansa Stark never will._

~ 

_He marches to certain victory at Blackwater Bay._

_He returns, having suffered the single worst defeat of his military career._

_‘Where’s your god now?’_

_No better than a savage, trusting in a damned fire god. He fought for her god, led his men into the seventh hell for her god, and where are they now?_

_Dead, along with all his ships at the bottom of Blackwater Bay._

_She’s taunting him—laughing in his face like Robert, and Renly, and all the others._

_Like hell, she’s fought for far longer than him. He’s been fighting for everything he has since the day his mother birthed him._

_‘Show me how you fight—show me!’_

_He has never laid his hands on a woman in violence before._

_But he can feel her long, burning throat pulsing, dying in his hands, and it feels like justice for his screaming men._

_Just for a moment._

_And then the justice is gone. His men—his army—are still dead, and he’s seen the Red Woman survive poison even as she gulped it down like sweetwine._

_He can’t kill her now._

_‘I murdered my brother.’_

_He wasn’t her brother—wasn’t her seed that quickened into death, kinslaying._

_She speaks to him of endless war, death upon death, and betrayal._

_He doesn’t want it. Has clung to his honor all his life while Robert was given everything on a silver platter._

_He has no wish to be a betrayer of his people._

_Gold is cold, and heavy on the head. But it is also a duty left to him by his brother in the grave._

_So they carry on, and sometime between Melisandre abandoning him—'Your fires burn low, My King’—and her return, Davos’ release, there is Selyse._

_‘My Lady.’_

_And she is—_

_There is a reason, he is reminded, why he rarely ventures to this tower. A reason why his backbone stiffens and his skin crawls when he walks through her door. He can see the green light and shadows dancing across the stone floor—three corpses, tiny._

_They should be buried somewhere._

_Cast out to sea._

_Mourned at their births, not years after like a boar’s head mounted on a wall as a prize._

_Selyse, and he has to tell her, tries to tell her, and she—_

_Already knows._

_Damn her. Damn his wife, damn the Red Woman, damn her fire god who is no more real than the ones who left his parents to drown._

_His wife stares up at him and tells him that his shattered honor, his fucking a fire priestess like Robert fucked his whores, is God’s will, a sacred duty, like kingship or death by the sword, and for just the smallest of moments, he wants to know what her throat would feel like squeezed between his hands too._

_But he doesn’t, because he’s made vows to her and he won’t break them any further._

_She tries to keep him from Shireen._

_Tries to keep him from the one thing precious to him on Dragonstone, now his honor has gone from him._

_‘She’s my daughter. I want to see her.’_

_And blessedly, when he walks out her door, she doesn’t follow._

_~_

He watches Shireen, because he can feel her watching him.

_Shireen, who only days ago watched as her mother burned herself alive._

He feels her eyes on him when he walks across the yard at Winterfell, when he eats with his men, when he spreads maps before himself in the library Ned Stark was always so proud of. 

He watches her, and he sees that she watches Sansa Stark too.

Sansa Stark, who has taken to visiting her precious weirwood for hours every day. Sometimes he thinks he can see her lips moving, see her speaking to it, and he wonders if the Old Gods are like the Seven; if she’s praying for her family, both the dead and the living.

Renly always prayed for their parents, though he could never remember their mother’s face, at the end.

But Shireen—she is something else entirely. Not Sansa Stark, in all of her grief and wariness, certainly not Renly, in his arrogance. 

_Shireen is something altogether foreign to him, and he does not think he will ever learn her. Not the way she wants him to._

She’s silent. Has been since Selyse threw herself on the pyre. She says nothing more than what’s required to get her meals and bathwater, and he wonders where his daughter bursting with words has gone.

_Are you ashamed of me?_

He is a man who is not ashamed of a great many things in his life; among them are Renly, and his peach. He never loved Robert; perhaps wanted to and resented that his older brother made himself someone he could not. But he did love Renly, the sweet boy that he remembers running through the halls of Storm’s End, though he never loved him well enough.

He never used to be ashamed of Selyse, when every man in Westeros told him he should be. Was never ashamed that she failed to give him a son, because he did his duty to her and she to him. 

But of late…of late he is. Not of her madness, not of her despair. 

But of her utter distaste for their sweet Shireen, whom he has never been ashamed of a single day of her life.

And of the only vow he has ever broken.

_God’s work._

The Red Woman. He is truly ashamed of her.

But sometimes cleaner ways do not win battles, and now there’s a war before him he cannot be sure he will ever win.

He must take whatever advantage he is able. And so red magic it is.

Except now—now Sansa Stark is here, and she’s brought with her an army of Northern men.

She has been driven half mad, he is almost certain of it.

She has been twice wed with no sons to show for it, though the Imp and the Bastard of Bolton may be more to blame for that.

_He may inspire only the very same results—he never could father sons with Selyse._

But she is Ned Stark’s daughter, her blood runs as long and high as his own, and he needs her North.

_Save the kingdom to win the throne._

He will do it better this time, will honor his vow till the day it is broken by death. And maybe if he does, he will not be left with yet another source of shame.

~ 

_Shireen is both a blessed relief and an unbearable burden. She looks up at him with eyes that are like the sun shining into the depths of Dragonstone itself, and he cannot—cannot make sense of it. Cannot make it into something steady and true, but rather, she remains something ephemeral, dreamlike. Something to haunt him and keep him awake at night, a fleeting hint of light where he knows good and well there should be none._

_Those eyes expect things of him that he has never had the slightest idea of how to give._

_But he bears her anyway, because she is his daughter, and so he must._

_Bears her affections, her arms wrapped tight around his waist._

_Bears her smile; she has longed so to see him, and he is left feeling only lacking in the face of such avid expectation. He is sure to disappoint._

_He bears her face, and it is beautiful. Perfectly shaped, light and lovely. She looks like his mother, like Lady Cassana, and there never was a more beautiful woman to be found in all of the Stormlands. His father said it himself._

_He bears her face, and in the firelight, he sees what he has done to it. And it is such a heavy burden to shoulder._

_Sweet Shireen._

_But he does it, bears it, so that she will never have to._

_To hell with them all._

_But above all, he bears her innocence. The innocence of a sweet child who has never known the cries and the weepings of war. A child who does not know, cannot yet have thought of it, but who will one day sit the Iron Throne as Queen._

_He bears her belief. Her unquestioning happiness at his presence, and for a terrible, blessed time, there is no war, no wife, no priestess, or even a throne._

_There is only Shireen. And he is nothing more or less than her father._

_Not even a King._

_~_

The cold cuts deep into the flesh of them as they swear their vows before the weirwood at Winterfell.

When the maester tells him to cloak his bride, he takes his cloak—his _real_ cloak, and not some golden monstrosity—from his own shoulders and drapes it across hers.

Her shivering lessens.

His own flesh leaps with the pain of the cold.

But no matter.

_I am hers, and she is mine, from this day, till the end of my days._

Davos, Shireen on his right. Jon Snow on her left.

She wears grey, heavy wool, and with the snow flying around her, he thinks that were they not standing so close, he would be able to see nothing of her but her hair. 

_Flame, in the dead of winter._

There will be no wedding feast tonight, no wine flooding the halls of the keep. Wartime makes short work of excess and waste.

 _And he has already been the groom at a wedding feast, and has found the role to suit him ill._

The maester tells him to kiss her. Tells him it is his _duty_ to kiss his wife and seal their vows.

Her cheeks are red with the cold. She killed a man only days ago, and he with her. 

_They murdered her husband so they could stand here._

But it was no crime of love.

Short. Brisk. Snow-chilled. His lips on hers for barely a moment; she does not look at him before, and he does not look at her after.

Her Northmen cheer them when they return to the castle, and she nods, smiles at them without smiling.

He leaves her to do as she will, and takes to studying his maps again, the ancient tomes that speak of _Others_ beyond the wall.

It is midday yet.

There will be no need to trouble her till nightfall.

~

_Sansa paces, breathes short, shallow, frozen gusts that hang before her like poisonous clouds._

_She has not thought of her mother in so long; it has been since King’s Landing, since news of the horrors of The Twins, but now all she can think of is her mother, and her father, and the love they built inside these walls._

_And she horror she has lived through inside the very same._

_Her second wedding night here, and already, she must fight with all of her strength, every last bit of it, not to drown in the memory of the first._

_He is King Stannis Baratheon, Protector of the Realm._

_He is Jon’s king, Ser Davos’ king. His men fear him, but with respect and not terror._

_He is, by all accounts, an honorable man, if not a pleasant one._

_Her heart._

_Beat._

_Beat._

_Beat._

_He is, by all accounts, an honorable man, and she can do nothing but wait in terror of what is to come._

_~_

Davos leaves him an unsealed jar before retiring for the night. 

Stannis knows with only a touch what it is. 

_Oil._

He would growl if his hand were still present. He requires no reminders of his duty.

_At least the harmless little jar will take the cruelty out of the night, even if it will not make it particularly pleasurable. But no matter. He has need of men, an army. Not of the sort of pleasures Robert always found between a woman’s legs._

Grits his teeth. _Lady Stark._ Baratheon now, though the name does not ring the same way.

He has made his way to her chamber door in the times it has taken to cure his pique at Ser Davos, and he hears only silence from the inside.

_Perhaps she is asleep? He has left it quite late, without intending to._

Knocks quietly—no need to wake the castle—and enters.

She sits on the bed, a curtain of white covering her and one of Tully-red hiding her face.

At least it is, in fact, his _own_ bride in his marriage bed tonight, and not his brother and the wrong Florent.

_“My Lady.”_

_“Your Grace.”_

That red curtain shifts, there is her face, and it is one of stone.

 _He sees her cut a nick in the foolish boy’s thigh. Sees the blood drain from it slowly, had returned the room after seeing her to her own, and had remained at the Bastard of Bolton’s side until the final breath fled his body._

_A curl of lip. Shameful boy. Disgusting boy. He would have gelded him if he had been some Stormland get._

_But he supposes Sansa Stark’s justice was more than enough._

Now they are here, alone, and in a bedchamber, and she is _looking_ at him as he sets the little jar of oil on the trunk at the foot of the bed.

She lies back. 

It is simple enough to put his fingers to work at his own laces, to loosen things enough to hold his cock in hand.

_Soft. There is little pleasure to be had in a marriage bed, and none at all to be had from a girl who fears his every breath._

But his hand proves assistance enough. 

Her breaths are short, uneven things, and he reaches for the jar.

 _“I will need to—”_

What? Touch her? Lay his hands upon her? 

_Demand sons of her?_

No. He’ll make no demands of the Stark girl. She’s done duty enough to him in saying vows that have given him all her men.

His hands are at her ankles, the hem of her nightdress, soft and linen, and he eases the thing up.

_Cold skin, pale legs on the bedfurs._

_“My Lady—”_

He tries again, but gets no further. Does not know what it is he should try to say. Scoops a bit of the hardened oil up with two fingers, places it against her, and waits for it to melt enough to spread. 

_She is burning, a fire in the middle of a sea of ice, where his fingers touch her._

And she jumps.

_Whimpers._

Closes her eyes in a flight of terror.

Clenches her fingers against the white sheets.

He grits his teeth and sighs. 

_Sansa Stark._

But he does his duty, and melts the oil. Uses his fingers to spread it thick inside.

Takes cock in hand and tries to think of nothing at all as he readies to make this girl into his wife. 

~

 _Sansa cannot breathe._

_His touch, it is rough. His hands are cold. And his fingers are just there. Just where she never, ever wants to be touched again._

_She struggles against it, the urge to shrink away. The urge to cry out in pain that she knows will come. The memories are so thick, she cannot see his face in front of her own._

_When he comes close to her, presses against her, first with fingers coated in cool slickness, probing, stretching, leaving her gasping in humiliated discomfort, then with his manhood, that part of him that will tear her bloody and raw, she swallows back hard against bile._

_For Jon, she thinks. For Winterfell, the North._

_For the look in Ramsey’s eyes when she came near to him with a knife._

_And he is stretching her, sinking into her, she is panicking, barely keeping herself from beating her fists against him to push him off of her, and—_

_It does not…hurt._

_There is pain. Discomfort. Her body protests his every move; his every heartbeat as though it is bruising her._

_But he has not torn her in two._

_She whimpers, still. Her face twists against him, fingers clawing so deeply into the sheets, she cannot feel their tips any longer._

_She gasps, and then he._

_He moves, she loses a crying gasp. No tears, just a raw throat that knows it should scream. Wedding beds are places for screaming._

_He grunts—a sound of frustration—as her whole body clenches tight to keep him still, to keep him from wearing her bloody._

_“Seven-hells, girl—calm yourself, or we’ll never be finished.”_

_She has never heard the King swear before. King Robert with his every breath, but never, ever King Stannis._

_She gasps, swallows back against tears. Against the stretching, aching discomfort that is not—can it be believed—pain._

_He grunts again as she unclenches, and unbelievably, inexplicably, she laughs._

_A short, muffled thing, wet with tears she knows are beyond her ability to cry. She opens her eyes and sees him peering at her, a disgruntled expression on his face, and something strange and knotted inside of her eases, just a little bit._

_She laughs again, quiet, and feels him thrust without cruelty or conquest. Nothing but duty now, and she is so, so astonished._

_She has been wed twice. She has borne the desire of two loathsome men. In her marriage bed she has known her first husband to be cruel, gleeful, sinister, and seductive, but King Stannis Baratheon, Protector of the Realm, comes to her irritable and impatient to just get on with it._

_She feels, just for the tiniest moment, as though she is light enough to fly._

_~_

He leaves her soon after he finishes, cleans himself, and finds his own bed.

At the very least, she is not weeping.

An awkward duty with a moment’s pleasure to be had at the end, and now he is wed, yet again _._

_But she is not weeping. And she did not shy away, even in her fear and pain._

Sansa Stark is winter, through and through, and she has done her family name proud this day. Brought honor to her father’s house.

And he admires her for it—admires all of that Stark strength.

She will need it, he supposes, if he is going to make her his Queen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave a comment to let me know what you think!


End file.
